Romantic ‘anglo-italians’

For my parents
and for Yiorgos
Romantic ‘anglo-italians’
Configurations of Identity in Byron,
the Shelleys, and the Pisan Circle

maRia schoina
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
First published 2009 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Schoina, Maria
Romantic ‘Anglo-Italians’: configurations of identity in Byron, the Shelleys, and the
Pisan Circle. – (The nineteenth century series)
1. Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 1788–1824 2. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft,
1797–1851 3. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822 4. Hunt, Leigh, 1784–1859
5. Poets, English – Italy – Pisa 6. English – Cultural assimilation – Italy – Pisa –
History – 19th century 7. English poetry – Italian influences 8. Italianization – Sex
differences 9. Italy – Intellectual life – 1789–1900
I. Title
821.7’09
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schoina, Maria.
Romantic ‘Anglo-Italians’: configurations of identity in Byron, the Shelleys, and the
Pisan Circle / by Maria Schoina.
p. cm. — (The nineteenth century series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-6292-1 (alk. paper)
1. Romanticism—Great Britain. 2. English literature—19th century—History and
criticism. 3. British—Italy—History—19th century. 4. Acculturation—Italy—History—
19th century. 5. Italy—Intellectual life—1789–1900. 6. Acculturation in literature.
7. Italy—In literature. I. Title.

PR457.S38 2009
820.9’007—dc22
2008055040
ISBN 9780754662921 (hbk)
 Contents

List of Illustrations vi
General Editors’ Preface vii
Acknowledgements viii
Abbreviations and Short Titles ix

Introduction: Roots, Routes and Hyphens: Reconsidering

Romantic Identity 1
‘A well-informed, clever, and active race’ 1
Culture, Place, Identity, Politics 6
Italy and the British Romantics 12
1 Anglo-Italian Spaces and Metaphors in the Cultural Discourse of
the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century 19
A Tale of Two Countries 19
Cities of the Mind: Venice and London in Late
Eighteenth-Century Capriccio Paintings 36
‘Melancholy feelings expressed … with Italian imagination’
in Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy 50
2 Mary Shelley, Anglo-Italicus 57
Between Italy and England 57
Female Self-Assertion and the Politics of Distinction
in the Reviews and in Rambles in Germany and Italy
in 1840, 1842, and 1843 64
3 ‘My heart is all meridian’: Byron’s Poetics of Acculturation 89
‘To see men and things as they are’: The Quest for
Authenticity in Post-Napoleonic Travel Writing 89
Byron’s Negotiating Identities in Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage IV, ‘To the Po. June 2nd 1819’, Beppo
and in The Prophecy of Dante 99
4 Rooting the Anglo-Italian: Place and Identity in the Pisan Circle 125
Revisiting the Pisan Circle 125
Percy Shelley’s ‘Elective Affinities’: The Pisan Poems and
the Review of Sgricci’s Improvisation 130
The Anglo-Italian Liberal: Leigh Hunt’s ‘Letters from
Abroad’ 152
Epilogue: (Post)Romantic Reflections on Acculturation 163

Bibliography 169
Index 183
 List of Illustrations

1.1 British gentlemen in Rome, Artist unknown, c.1750, Oil on

canvas, 37 ¼ x 53in. (94.6 x 134.6cm), Yale Center for British
Art, and Paul Mellon Collection. 38

1.2 Giovanni Paolo Pannini: Roma Antica. Imaginäre Galerie mit

Ansichten der berühmtesten, antiken Bauten und Skulpturen
Roms, 1757, Öl auf Leinwand, 186,0 x 227,0 cm, Staatsgalerie
Stuttgart. 40

1.3 Antonio Joli, Capriccio with St. Paul’s and Old London
Bridge, c. 1746, Oil on canvas, 42 x 47 in. (106.7 x 119.4 cm),
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Alice Bradford
Woolsey, 1970 (1970.212.2) Image © The Metropolitan
Museum of Art. 43

1.4 Westminster Bridge, with the Lord Mayor’s Procession on the

Thames, Canaletto, 1747, Oil on canvas, 37 ¾ x 50 1/4in.
(95.9 x 127.6cm), Yale Center for British Art, and Paul Mellon
Collection. 44

1.5 Marlow, William, Capriccio: St. Paul’s and a Venetian Canal,

c.1795, © Tate, London, 2008. 46
 The Nineteenth Century Series
General Editors’ Preface
The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest
in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that
former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding
not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily
upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also
includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of
current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical
literature, travel writing, book production, gender, non-canonical writing. We are
dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy
is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and both
to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the
designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas and theories,
while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet
so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep,
and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect
of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape.

Vincent Newey
Joanne Shattock
University of Leicester
 Acknowledgements

A section of Chapter 3 first appeared as part of an essay in Romanticism on the Net

43 (2006), a section of Chapter 2 as part of an essay in Journal of Anglo-Italian
Studies 8 (2006) and the final section of Chapter 4 as an essay in Romanticism 12.2
(2006). They are included here by permission of the editors.
Thank you to the Greek State Scholarships Foundation and the Research
Committee of Aristotle University for their financial assistance, and to the Italian
Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a research scholarship.
I am grateful to the following museums for granting permission to publish
images in their possession: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection;
Tate Gallery Britain; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Staatsgallerie
Stuttgart.
I would like to thank and acknowledge the following people for their support,
inspiration and encouragement during the conception and writing of this book:
Roderick Cavaliero, Peter Cochran, Jonathan Cook, Lilla-Maria Crisafulli,
Peter Graham, Richard Holmes, Ekaterini Douka-Kabitoglou, Michael O’Neill,
Nicholas Roe, Timothy Webb.
 Abbreviations and Short Titles

BLJ Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 12 vols. (London:
John Murray, 1973-1982).
BP Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann,
7 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980–1993).
EI ‘The English in Italy’, The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett
and Charles Robinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
L The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South, 2 vols., 4 issues
(London: John Hunt, 1822–1823. Salzburg: Institut für Englische
Sprache und Literatur Universität Salzburg, 1978).
MI ‘Modern Italy’, The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett and
Charles Robinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
MWSJ The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, ed. Paula Feldman and
Diana Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
MWSL The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett,
3 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
PBSL The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederic L. Jones, 2 vols.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
Poems Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1971).
Prose Shelley’s Prose or the Trumpet of a Prophesy, ed. David Lee Clark
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954).
Rambles Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843, The Novels
and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, gen. ed. Nora Crook with Pamela
Clemit, 8 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1996), vol. 8: Travel
Writing, Index, ed. Jeanne Moskal.
RI ‘Recollections of Italy’, The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T.
Bennett and Charles Robinson (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990).
TC ‘The Choice’, The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, vol. 2,
pp. 490–94.
VB ‘A Visit to Brighton’, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley,
gen. ed. Nora Crook with Pamela Clemit, 8 vols. (London: William
Pickering, 1996), vol. 2: Matilda, Dramas, Reviews & Essays,
Prefaces and Notes, ed. Pamela Clemit.
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction
Roots, Routes and Hyphens:
Reconsidering Romantic Identity
‘A well-informed, clever, and active race’

Fu nel piu alto stile della poesia tragica, ed ellettrizzava il Teatro. … In questo
talento, e tutto pur d’Italia – l’imaginazione fa, fra di noi, in un momento l’opra
che l’intelletto consomma fra gli altri in lungo tempo, o dopo molte tentative, e
questo dono e il pregio del nostro presente destino, ed il pegno del futuro.

The event recorded in this rapturous account is Tommaso Sgricci’s celebrated

performance of La Morte d’Ettore [The Death of Hector], a practice of poesia
espontanea, which took place in the theatre of Pisa on 22 January 1821. In fairly
inaccurate, yet spirited Italian, the writer-spectator communicates his euphoria
and admiration for not only the improviser’s artistry, but also the ‘miraculous’
transformation of the Pisan theatre, through the power of imagination and poetry,
into an abode of inspiration, creativity and love.
The enthusiastic admirer of the improvvisatore Sgricci is Percy Bysshe Shelley,
who attended the event with Mary Shelley and other members of the small English
community of Pisa. His review of the performance, which was never published,
is a relatively unknown document. Nonetheless, it is important, as it complicates
established critical views on Shelley’s intransigence towards modern Italians. In
effect, Shelley not only engaged with Italian society but he often attempted to
naturalize his relationship to his surrounding environment, establishing ties and
connections while at Pisa. The above text is an appropriate, though rare, example
of Shelley’s immersion in Italianness: first through the employment of the Italian
language for what was intended as a public text, and second through Shelley’s use
of the first person plural to associate himself with the Pisan audience.
Shelley’s atypical attachment to Italy’s place, language, and community
– three fundamental ‘systems of meaning which produce culture’ according to
Stuart Hall (‘New Cultures for Old’ 180) – is symptomatic of a wider discourse of
acculturation which many British Romantic expatriates developed while in Italy
or after their return home. Accordingly, Byron’s much-discussed acclimatisation


Taken from P.M. Dawson, ‘Shelley and the Improvvisatore Sgricci: An Unpublished
Review,’ Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin Rome XXXII (1981): 19–29. ‘[It] was in the
highest style of tragic poetry and electrified the theatre…In this ability, is the most distinctive
characteristic of Italy – among us the imagination performs in an instant the work which the
reason accomplishes among others in a long period of time, or after many attempts, and this
gift is the glory of our present destiny, and the pledge of our future’ (Translated by Dawson
28–9). Shelley’s review is discussed in detail in Chapter 4.
2 Romantic ‘Anglo-Italians’

to the Italian way of life and his versatile identification with the Italian society of
his day remain challenging and open-ended chapters in the legendary (hi)story
of the Regency aristocrat’s six-year sojourn in the peninsula (1816–1822). The
portrait of Byron as an Italianized Briton occurred frequently in both the English
and Italian cultural discourses of the time, a result of the poet’s popularity in both
countries and of his own efforts to promote a bicultural image of himself through
his letters and poems. Thus, it is not surprising that in 1832 Mary Shelley would
cite her husband’s famous Italianized friend and co-expatriate in a review of a book
with an Italian theme, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo: a Venetian Story.2
Mary Shelley’s skillfully rendered portrait of Byron as an exemplary ‘insider’ in
Italian society has profound and far-reaching effects. Thus, on the one hand, the
sketch pits the book’s author against Byron’s ‘authentic’ Italianisation, and, on the
other hand, establishes Byron’s insider knowledge as a pattern of acculturation.
By instancing Byron’s ‘amalgamation’ – to use Mary Shelley’s arresting term
– into Italian society as a paradigm of second culture acquisition, the reviewer of
The Bravo exemplifies and theorizes acculturation, mapping the intricate rites and
logistics which pertain to the experience of crossing over cultures and of adapting
foreign elements as one’s own.
Having been a participant-observer in the culture of Italy, and a member of
the notorious Pisan circle, Mary Shelley would often engage with the subjects
of acculturation and authentic knowledge of other places in her works. More
particularly, after her return to England in 1823, her reviews of literary or artistic
works about Italy offered suitable space for vigorous comparative portraits of
Italy and England and for the exploration of ‘betweenness’ as ‘the place of the
subject, as the issuing point of the subjective or subjectifying utterance’ (Saglia,
Poetic Castles 144). Mary Shelley’s discussions engage with cultural matters
crucial to her contemporaries but they also raise modern issues about identity
construction, intercultural perception and representation. To return to her portrait
of Byron, the ideas expressed in this review originate in her 1826 essay ‘The
English in Italy’, where Mary Shelley labels Byron the initiator of an intercultural

2
Originally published in the Westminster Review, Mary Shelley’s review essay is
reprinted in The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, gen. ed. Nora Crook with
Pamela Clemit, 8 vols. (London: William Pickering 1996), vol. 2: Matilda, Dramas, Reviews
& Essays. Prefaces and Notes, ed. Pamela Clemit, 218–29. The excerpt I am referring to
is the following: ‘Lord Byron was one of the few strangers who was admitted, or would
choose to be admitted, behind the scenes of that singular stage [of Venetian society]. The
money he was willing to squander there, the extreme ease with which he acquired and used
the idiom of language, and the facility with which he amalgamated himself with, and gave
a zest to their customs, by an openness of practice which transcended even their liberality of
sentiment, all tended to initiate him into the very arcana of Venice…Mr Cooper has visited
Venice, we imagine; he has probably dwelt there some time, but he has not Italianized
himself, nor is he in the slightest degree familiar with the language;…nor does he attempt
to lead us into the interior of families, nor to dwell upon the forms of life belonging to the
æra he has undertaken to describe’ (220–21).
 Introduction 3

literary movement: ‘Lord Byron may be considered the father of the Anglo-Italian
literature, and Beppo as being the first product of that school.’3 However, as we go
on to read, the qualification ‘Anglo-Italian’ departs from the standard dictionary
meaning of the compound form, that is, English in connection with something else.
Instead, the term is used to designate the literature which derives from ‘Italianized’
English proper:

This preference accorded to Italy by the greater part of the emigrant English
has given rise to a new race or sect among our countrymen, who have lately
been dubbed Anglo-Italians…The Anglo-Italians may be pronounced a well-
informed, clever, and active race. (EI 343)

The repeated use of a term as complicated and loaded as ‘race’ in Mary Shelley’s
elaborate portrait of the Anglo-Italian calls for a brief look into the history of
its use in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary (OED),4 ‘race’ denotes, in its broadest sense, common
biological descent or origin as regards a group of persons, animals or plants. The
term was also used at the time to describe ‘a tribe, nation, or people regarded as
of common stock’ and the example dated 1827 reads ‘the worst race of people
inhabiting that part.’ The OED also registers the meaning of race as ‘a set or class
of persons’ without any explicit reference to blood ties, as in ‘Race of Coxcombs’
(dated 1712), ‘The race of learned men, Still at their books’ (1748) and in ‘The
Two Races of Men, the Men who borrow, and the men who lend’ (1821), a phrase
used by the poet and essayist Charles Lamb in his Essays of Elia.
According to Raymond Williams, the difficulties of the term race begin ‘when
it is used to denote a group within a species’ (248), and when the old senses of
blood and stock extend to the classification of wider social, cultural and national
groups (249). In the Romantic period, racial difference was explained in terms
of environmental modification of human physiology, a belief deriving from
Enlightenment sources. Although the age witnessed the beginnings of a shift in
the way race was related to nationality and culture, it was in the mid-nineteenth
century and onwards that scientific work in the field of anthropology and biology
was systematically implemented by political and social thought. These discourses
capitalized on the precept of a hierarchy of races, justifying theories of imperialism,
the slave-trade, and racial superiority (Kitson 19).
In her definition of the Anglo-Italian, Mary Shelley maps a community of
cultured, sophisticated, emigrant British in Italy with a distinct standard of taste,

3
Originally published in Westminster Review 6 (October 1826): 325–41. ‘The
English in Italy’ is reprinted in The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles
Robinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) 341–57. All subsequent references
are to this edition and is henceforth quoted as EI.
4
The Oxford English Dictionary, being a corrected re-issue with an introduction,
supplement, and bibliography of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933. Rpt. 1961 and is henceforth quoted as OED.
4 Romantic ‘Anglo-Italians’

a unified sensibility, a discrete sense of place-attachment, and a shared vision for

cultural reform. Considering the meanings of ‘race’ in context, as well as the highly
specific characteristics Mary Shelley assigns to these literati, it can be deduced that
the ‘race’ of Anglo-Italians is used in the third sense of the word, namely to refer
to a set or group of people with common interests. In addition, the idea of bonding
inherent in the meaning of race underscores the Anglo-Italians’ awareness of their
professed civilising mission to Italianize their compatriots, as a communal, not an
individual undertaking. In a sense, Mary Shelley portrays the Pisan circle without
naming it, five years after its dissolution. Percy Shelley, Byron, Claire Clairmont,
Thomas Medwin, the Williamses, Trelawny, Leigh Hunt and she herself hover
behind the distinctive patterns of behaviour she de/pre-scribes for the ‘race’ of
Anglo-Italians.
Nonetheless, as previously noted, the early nineteenth century was a time
when the old and new meanings of ‘race’ seriously overlapped. Furthermore,
the ideological discourses that began to impinge on the term based their theories
largely upon the premise of common descent. Therefore, it can be argued that the
nuance of common blood ties cannot be easily disengaged from the other uses
of the word ‘race’ during that period, even if we speak of imagined blood ties.
Interestingly, the OED tells us that ‘race’ also denoted ‘a tribe, nation or people
regarded as of common stock’ (my emphasis). The imagining – and subsequent
imaging – of these people as a race is indeed a cultural process which establishes
the existence of the group of Anglo-Italians by defining what makes them a
community. This denominator complicates Mary Shelley’s text as to its function
and meaning. In my opinion, although the biological connection is imaginary, it
is nonetheless powerful. Thus, the author asserts this new identity position for the
acculturated British by laying claim to imagined natural and unchanging qualities,
such as filial bonds and common ancestry, rather than ‘added on’ features. As a
result, the community of Anglo-Italians demarcate their space of action through
difference in two directions: ‘we’ versus our ‘un-Italianized countrymen’ (EI 343),
and ‘we’ versus the less ‘refined’ Italians (EI 343). In this way, the Anglo-Italians
seek to legitimate their cultural authority concerning things Italian vis-à-vis their
compatriots, but they also strictly qualify their acculturation processes in relation
to Italian society.
By figuring Italianness as a necessary and constitutive element for the identity
of the modern British, the texts by Mary Shelley confirm the importance and
currency Italy had assumed in the British consciousness after the Napoleonic
wars. They also hint at the fact, however, that in the process, Italianness was de-
contextualized from its geographical-cultural reality and was intimately infiltrated
into British narratives and keyed to various British concerns, such as the forging
of British identity, the rise of the English middle-class, and the envisioning, by a
group of Romantic liberal intellectuals, of a European/universal cultural, political
and social reform. In the light of this contradiction, the mobilisation of Italianness
into the construction of a hyphenated self-representation has, in my opinion,
considerable political hold.
 Introduction 5

This book discusses the ‘Anglo-Italian’ identity politics of post-Napoleonic

British expatriates in Italy, recovering the discursive techniques employed in their
identifications with Italianness, exploring the ambivalences and contradictions
which beset the fashioning of this configuration, and assessing the relevance
of these activities in the context of the dominant themes and preoccupations in
Romantic culture. More specifically, I propose that the so-called ‘Anglo-Italians’
fashioned a hyphenated identity and displayed varying degrees of identification
with Italianness in an attempt to establish a bicultural sensibility and, through
this, an alternative coalition with ‘foreignness’, namely, with Italian place, culture,
language and community. My contention is that Mary Shelley’s configuration of
this eccentric self-representation designates a qualitative, complex and multifaceted
alliance with Italy and Italianness, and can illuminate the acculturating plots of the
members of the Pisan circle in particular, and of the British emigrants in Italy in
general.
Though often noted, the phenomenon of the Romantic Anglo-Italian has never
been properly studied. The term is used perfunctorily in discussions of British
literati who lived in Italy at the time (including second generation Romantics) to
suggest the degree of intimacy these expatriates had developed with their ‘adopted’
country. Mary Shelley’s definition of Anglo-Italianness in the said review is
underplayed, being read either as an instance of her ‘gentile ironia’ (Crisafulli, ‘Il
viaggio olistico’ 167), or as a rhetorical tactic of distinguishing the cultured Briton
abroad from the plain tourist (Smith 160–62).5 My own reading gives a prominent
role to Mary Shelley as retrospective constructor of the Pisan group, and makes a
case for the importance of gender as a major determinant of her conceptualisation
of Anglo-Italianness. Additionally, it sets out to elucidate the stakes, tensions and
strains involved in the acculturating practices of the Anglo-Italians.
To avoid confusion with the chronology of the texts examined, it is important
to note from the beginning that although the hybrid figure does not appear in Mary
Shelley’s writings until she is back in England (1823), I argue that the intriguing
literature around the ‘race’ of Anglo-Italians Mary Shelley constructs back home
casts a retrospective light on the identity and spatial politics of the circle of
expatriates which had formed around her and Shelley in Italy in the early 1820s.
Nonetheless, although my interpretation of Romantic Anglo-Italians builds on
Mary Shelley’s elaborate definitions, it also heavily relies on the insights rendered
by an examination of the expatriates’ own discourse of acculturation, as they
developed it while in Italy. Thus, Mary Shelley’s retrospective critical assessment
of the Pisan circle is viewed in its rich dialectic with the concurrent acculturating
practices of Byron, Percy Shelley and Leigh Hunt.
This study addresses a set of critical questions related to the issue of cultural
identity, such as why people invest in a particular identity position and adopt it, and

5
Though limited in its scope, Smith’s approach is valuable, as she is the only critic
who attempts to trace the figure of the Anglo-Italian through Mary Shelley’s writings,
raising interesting questions about its function and meaning.
6 Romantic ‘Anglo-Italians’

what the processes involved in the creation and assertion of identities are. It also
enquires into the political stakes involved in the formation of alternative identity
positions and the intriguing relationship between place and self. In addition, the
contextualisation of the self through places and cultures in the works of Byron,
Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley and Leigh Hunt poses a number of questions about
the theoretical conceptualisation of Romantic identity. Indeed, one of the central
concerns of this study is to explore not only the generative role of place, culture
and travel in the formation of the Romantic identity, but also the configuration of
the self as inhabiting a qualitative ‘betweenness’, oscillating between essentialism
(roots) and relationality (routes), between the familiar (English) and the foreign
(Italian). Thus, the section that follows will also consider contemporary critical
discussions of Romantic subjectivity, which in recent years have removed Romantic
identity from the ‘depth model’ and its traditional, idealistic illustrations, and have
attempted to redefine it according to the ‘contextualist’ paradigm.

Culture, Place, Identity, Politics

The publication in 1983 of Jerome J. McGann’s The Romantic Ideology precipitated

a return to historical and political studies of the Romantic period. Critics began
to analyze notions of ideology, class and gender in an attempt to deconstruct
previous notions of ‘Romanticism’ as a mainly aesthetic and literary movement.
Much effort has been made ever since to return Romantic discourse to the contexts
in which it was written and read, to what Marilyn Butler calls the ‘actual literary
communities as they functioned within their larger communities in time and place’
(‘Repossessing the Past’ 72). Butler’s comment acquires particular significance
in the context of British Romantic writers who lived or travelled outside Britain
and functioned perforce within the indigenous communities of host countries. In
her 1981 book Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, Butler duly historicized the
celebrated Pisan circle of Byron and the Shelleys in new ways. In her account, the
cult of the South was a brief efflorescence, whereby the classical Mediterranean
realm became available to the liberals ‘as an alternative to the gloomy nativist
Christianity of the Gothic north’ (David Simpson 143). Butler has argued for
the pivotal importance of Italy in the development of an unconventional, overtly
sensual, and politically disaffected ‘counter-culture’ in the works produced by
Shelley, Peacock, Leigh Hunt and Byron between 1817 and 1824.
An awareness of time and place is always significant in historical readings of
literature, and critical writing of this direction seeks to anchor literary works to the
specific social, cultural, political and economical environment(s) in which they
were produced, and re-discover the ways in which these contexts have infused
them. For instance, cultural historicisation, namely, the exploration of issues of
cultural power using the insights of postcolonial and feminist theories, is one of
the main concerns of current Romantic studies. Thus, in considering Romantic
travel accounts, Amanda Gilroy emphasizes the necessity of confronting ‘the
 Introduction 7

situated nature of experience’ (4), where ‘situation’ suggests cultural specificity,

and, by extension, the various ideological prescriptions which are enmeshed in
the geopolitical locales to which an observer/narrator/speaker belongs. This
‘situatedness’ emerges most visibly in cases of intercultural perception, in the
transcodification of foreign realities, and in constructions of the other.
Since Edward Said’s seminal study, Orientalism (1978), and the extensive
revisionist criticism it generated in cultural theory, literary studies have become
more alert to the discursive practices which underlie representations of other
cultures in travel writing and empire literature. Based on Michel Foucault’s
discussions of the relationships between power and knowledge, Said capitalizes
on the ideological nature of representations and hence on the contrived nature of
cultural meanings. Central to the emergence of discourse, that is, to the practices
of signification which provide a framework for understanding another culture, is
what Said terms ‘imaginative geography.’ The latter, in his words, ‘legitimates
a vocabulary, a universe of representative discourse’ (71) that ‘infuses history
and geography’ (55) and naturalizes the way in which the other culture is seen.
A related corollary of Said’s argument is that cultures gain their sense of identity
from contemplating their ‘cultural contestant[s]’ (1) and that they construct their
self-representation through difference. Critiques of Said’s theory argue that
Orientalism postulates a unified, dominant, and even monolithic conception of
discourse and Western culture and point out the theorist’s failure to recognize
forms of ambivalence, conflict and contradiction in the colonial encounter.
Appropriately, Homi Bhabha’s reflections on the heterogeneity of colonial and
postcolonial experience, which he attributes to a fundamental ambivalence in the
coloniser’s relation to the colonised, are an important contribution to this debate.
Bhabha develops his ideas through a set of key concepts: hybridity, indeterminacy,
‘the in-between’, interstices, and the ‘third space’, all of which articulate ideas of
split selves and discourses in the relationship between dominant and subaltern
groups.6
A study on Romantic Anglo-Italians begins essentially as a study of the two
cultures involved and how these cultures interact in the period examined. Although
the Anglo-Italian encounter does not fall into the category of the interchanges
that Said’s model prescribes, that is, between Britain and its non-European others,
I believe that intra-European ‘Meridionism’ – the term being used in academic
phraseology as a counterpart of global Orientalism – raises a number of issues
similar to those posed by Said’s theory. Thus, assuming that in the course of five
centuries of Western European history the affixture of the Italian identity to the
English one via cultural practices is qualified and conditioned by very specific

6
See, for instance, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) esp. pp. 1–18,
66–84, where Bhabha argues for a much more complicated (psychoanalytically informed)
relationship between coloniser and colonised. The notion of ‘third space’ is thoroughly
discussed in ‘The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha,’ Identity: Community, Culture,
Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990) 207–21.
8 Romantic ‘Anglo-Italians’

historical coordinates, it is my suggestion that the propensity of the English to

reinvent, depict and ultimately ground themselves as English and/or Italian in the
long eighteenth century is very much related to their need to understand their own
historical destiny and their changing role on the Continent in a rapidly changing
age. Nevertheless, precisely because the relationship between cultures is not
as unified and unambiguous as Said has described it, Britain played an equally
important, though different and less defining role as a ‘constitutive outside’ in the
formation of an Italian communal identity (Hall, ‘Who Needs “Identity”?’ 4). In
other words, the two cultures ‘invaded’ and appropriated each other’s spaces in the
cultural discourse of the time in an act of self-definition.
Cultural studies are becoming increasingly aware of the geographies of culture,
that is, the ways in which culture is, among other things, a matter of different
spaces, places and landscapes. Thus, in our case, Englishness or Italianness can
not be understood outside the places they make meaningful or outside the national/
cultural boundaries they mark out. It is also of interest that the period between
the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century features
a variety of crucial geo-cultural events and the increasing opening up of British
culture to other traditions and places through travel-writing, fictional narratives,
exotic objects and commodities, visual culture, archaeology and antiquarianism.
As a result, a cultural-geographical approach replaces traditional ideas about
the Romantic fascination with an ‘elsewhere’ with less escapist views, as the
Romantics’ writing of other and of their own places is enhanced by a variety of
geo-cultural and geo-political contents.7
Rooted in the importance of locations and places in the literary text, the cultural-
geographical approach represents a development of the intersection between the

7
Two important studies in the field of Romanticism have explicitly drawn on this
approach in order to assess the import of place in Romantic definitions of the self. Diego
saglia’s Poetic Castles of Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (2000)
focuses on representations of Spain in British literature (poetry) of the 1810s and 1820s,
investigating the discursive materials employed in these fictional representations. Drawing
mainly on Foucault’s notion of discourse and on postcolonial theory, the author attempts
to address ‘models of identity shaped within and by the Spanish text’ by delineating ‘a
Romantic topography of the self, that is a writing in terms of culture-specific places’ (148).
The second book, which is more akin to the content of my study, is Stephen Cheeke’s
Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia (2003). Cheeke draws substantially on
geography and history in order to analyze the palimpsests produced by Byron’s situatedness.
Cheeke examines the way in which the notion of ‘being there’ becomes the central claim
and shaping force in Byron’s poetry up to 1818, and investigates Byron’s self-imposed
exile in Italy and the gradual process of translation and acculturation which marks the
period 1818–1821. The author considers a number of poems of the Italian period placing
them in the context of Byron’s paradoxical ‘double Anglo-Italian cast’ (145). Although
Cheeke makes some original points, especially in the close readings of poems, he does not
place much emphasis on the political hold of Byron’s positioning among different kinds of
‘insider knowledge and outsider estrangement’ (145).
 Introduction 9

human sciences, cultural theory and literary criticism that has characterized the
study of literature in the last decades. What has been broadly called ‘cultural
geography’ or ‘new geography’8 seeks to recover an essentially geographical
dimension, namely, to explore the intimate relationship between people and their
environmental setting. This rethinking of the connection between human subject
and geography has renewed interest in philosophical questions of space and place
and has created various strands of thought, such as the poetic/phenomenological
and the social/ideological (emerging from Marxist cultural analysis).9 Central to
the cultural-geographical approach is the intersection of locality, spatiality, and
historical subjectivity. According to Stephen Cheeke, this re-emphasis on ‘situated
embodiment…inscribes the human subject with the reality of their physical
environment, as it conversely marks that environment with human experience and
culture at a deep level’ (‘Geo-History: Byron’s Beginnings’ 132).
The term ‘place-identity’ acquires rich nuances and becomes particularly
meaningful in the context of these two ‘antagonistic’ theoretical approaches
– the phenomenological and the ideological. On the one hand, environmental
psychologists have been using the term to define an individual’s strong emotional
attachment to particular places or settings. They largely concur with humanistic
geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan and Edward Relph in that places may engender a
sense of belonging and rootedness and they may also serve as contextual markers
for establishing one’s social identity. However, according to the psychologists,
place-identity is influenced by a wide range of experiences and relationships based
on a variety of physical contexts. The psychologist Theodore Sarbin highlights the
aspect of place-identity as a cognitive construction by drawing on the ‘emplotment’
of self in literature. He argues that ‘people engage in epistemic actions to fashion
their place identities – they do not come ready-made’ (339) and adds that ‘human
beings are guided in their acts by the particular emplotments they create in the
service of maintaining an acceptable personal narrative…People assign to place

8
According to Caroline Mills, cultural geography draws on two sources: one, firmly
anchored in geographical soil, is the Berkeley tradition which maps out the texture of material
artifacts in the landscape and traces their association to ways of life, the second is rooted
in cultural history and literary theory and alerts geographers to the politics of landscape
and the instability of meanings assigned to a world of material objects. See her article
‘Myths and Meanings of Gentrification,’ Place/Culture/Representation, ed. James Duncan
and David Ley (London: Routledge, 1993) 149–70. For an articulate introduction to the
new cultural geography, see Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning (London: Routledge, 1989;
rpt. 1999). After offering a critical review of the Berkeley School of cultural geography,
Jackson develops a materialist approach to the geographical study of culture, considering
the work of such cultural theorists as Raymond Williams, Clifford Geertz and Stuart Hall.
9
The poetic/phenomenological approach has been closely associated with the name
of Gaston Bachelard and his book The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1964), as well as with the humanistic geographers Yi-Fu Tuan and Edward Relph.
The social/Marxist strand has emerged from the work of Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja and
David Harvey.
10 Romantic ‘Anglo-Italians’

metaphorical qualities (rather than spatial dimensions) that appear in answer to the
place-identity question: “where am I?”’ (341).
On the other hand, a series of more sociological understandings of place
introduce notions of power relations into the way of understanding localities.
‘Senses of place’ are thus identified as part of the politics of identity, because such
subjective renderings of place often work to establish differences between one
group and another. As Gillian Rose points out, ‘the politics of claiming to be an
insider are also often the politics of claiming power’ (116). Similar interpretations
also emphasize the qualitative construction of places and argue that the politics lie
not just in particular characterizations assigned to places but in the very way in
which the image of place is constructed.
The approaches so far discussed outline two ways of understanding place
– which I view as complementary rather than as oppositional – both of which
pertain to the logistics of place in this study. The special significance that a local
sense of place acquired in British Romantic literature and sensibility due to the
historical circumstances of the age becomes meaningful in the context of what
humanistic geographers describe as place-identity. More specifically, in reaction
to a burgeoning international economy and to Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, an
inclination towards localism or place-attachment arises. Thus, for instance, in my
chapter on Percy Shelley, I explore the poet’s naturalising metaphors in his poetry
and prose which mark an act of identification with the place of Pisa. Conversely,
for a Romantic cosmopolite such as Byron, a location is an itinerary rather than a
bounded site – a series of encounters and translations. As I argue in the relevant
chapter, despite claiming natural attachment to Italy, Byron’s conception of place
(stability, safety) is mediated by his conception of space (mobility, insecurity).
However, as I hope to show, the Anglo-Italians construe their identities at
the nexus of bounded sites and itineraries, of roots and routes, and this complex
positioning calls for a more power-laden, ‘situated’ consideration of place. Their
identities are place-based rather than place-bound, meaning that place serves as
a point of reference, and not necessarily as ‘the central reference point of human
existence’ (Relph 20). Considering that the expatriated Romantics claim cultural
power through configuring particular meanings of Italy’s place and systems of
culture, I argue that Italy is systematically deployed in the articulation of their
identity politics. For example, Mary Shelley carefully utilizes Italy and Italianness
in the construction of a new personality, a new cultural model with which she
identifies, the Anglo-Italian, which she wishes to prescribe as a standard of taste,
learning and aesthetic competency. In addition, she exploits the dynamics of
this discursive configuration in order to construct a distinct literary and political
identity as a woman writer of her age.
As a concept, ‘identity politics’ has been made central to a number of theoretical
debates and political problems nowadays, however it requires further investigation
in the theoretical context of cultural studies. Despite the deconstructive and anti-
essentialist critiques of ethnic, racial and national conceptions of cultural identity,
‘we live in a world where identity matters’ (Gilroy 301). As Stuart Hall succinctly
 Introduction 

puts it, identity is ‘an idea which cannot be thought in the old way, but without
which certain key questions cannot be thought at all’ (‘Who Needs “Identity”?’
2). Principally, identity provides a way of understanding the interplay between
our subjective experience of the world, and the cultural and historical settings in
which subjectivity is formed. Our identities are shaped by social structures such
as gender, class and culture, but we also participate in forming our own identities.
This interrelationship between the personal and the social can also be expressed as
a tension between structure and agency.
More specifically, Hall rejects the transparent notion of the subject as the
centred agent of social practice (‘transcendental consciousness’), while he equally
challenges essentialist, unified views of identity grounded in some essential,
‘true’ quality, such as race, kinship ties, or tradition and argues for identity as the
product of history. Yet, at the same time he makes a case for the ‘irreducibility’
of the concept of identity (2). Following the direction indicated by Foucault’s
work, Hall adopts the discursive approach, arguing that what the decentring
of the subject requires ‘is not an abandonment or abolition of the subject but a
reconceptualisation – thinking it in its new, displaced or decentred position within
the paradigm. It seems to be in the attempt to rearticulate the relationship between
subjects and discursive practices that the question of identity recurs’ (2). In his
own effort to reformulate this debatable relationship, the culture critic uses the
term ‘identification’ instead of identity, further arguing that despite the material
and symbolic resources required to sustain it, identification is ultimately ‘a
construction…conditional, and lodged in contingency’ (2‒3). In other words,
identification is seen as the product of an intersection of different components, of
political and cultural discourses and particular histories. Hall sums up this central
point in the following way: ‘Cultural identities are the points of identification…
which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but a
positioning. Hence, there is always a politics of identity, a politics of position…’
(‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ 226).
The models of identity narrated through the ‘Italianized’ texts of Byron, the
Shelleys and their circle in the 1820s are contextual rather than essentialist. On
the one hand, the figure of the Anglo-Italian per se raises the issue of identity
construction, as it destabilizes the traditionally Romantic idea of culture being
rooted in one place and thus revolutionizes the notion of identity, which is now
figured as the product of cultural interrelation and connection. On the other hand,
however, we see the self being imaginatively grounded in fixed qualities, when
Mary Shelley wishes to essentialize cultural traits by appealing to the solidarity of
those who belong to the ‘race’ of Anglo-Italians. In my opinion, this contradiction
is due to the fact that the Romantic expatriates’ politics of identity, that is, their
conditional, shifting identification with Italy and Italianness does not cancel their
propensity to create an illusion of unity and of a unified subjectivity via the cultural
systems of their adopted country.
The Romantics’ positioning into the Italian scene of their day by means of
a rhetoric of Anglo-Italianness suggests fresh perspectives on intercultural
12 Romantic ‘Anglo-Italians’

perception in the field of British Romanticism, while, on the other hand,

complicates established ways of thinking about place and the Romantic subject.
This intricate relationship has been largely conditioned by William Wordsworth’s
paradigm of place as structuring subjectivity, or of place as nurturing the psyche,
a model which often transcends the geographical and the historical and figures
place as a ‘natural’, non-specific locale, as in the following lines from ‘Home
at Grasmere’: ‘Something that makes this individual Spot, / This small abiding-
place of many men, / A termination and a last retreat, / A Centre, come from
whereso’er you will, / A whole without dependence or defect, / Made for itself and
happy in itself, / Perfect Contentment, Unity entire…” (ll.164–70, qtd. in Kelsall
37). Revisionist criticism in Romantic studies, especially historicist approaches,
has brought about a repositioning of the issues of selfhood by showing the way
historical and ideological circumstances informed the conception of subjectivity.
The traditional idea of the deep self as a transcendental centre of consciousness,
inherited by the German philosophers’ privileging of the creative mind and the
imagination (Kant, Fichte, Schelling), and ardently expressed in M.H. Abrams’s
conviction that Wordsworth’s ‘vision is that of the awesome depths and height of
the human mind, and of the power of that mind as in itself adequate’ (28) has been
replaced by models of selfhood as historically constructed.10

Italy and the British Romantics

The majority of traditional scholarship in the area of Anglo-Italian relations in

the Romantic period has attempted to explore the Italian aesthetic and literary
influence on the Anglo-Saxon world, or on specific British Romantic poets and
writers. Thus, for instance, Peter Vassallo’s Byron: The Italian Literary Influence
(1984) and Timothy Webb’s relevant chapter on Shelley’s indebtedness to Dante
in his The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation (1976) are classic studies
of Italy’s enriching intellectual influence on the two expatriate poets. In addition,
there is a considerable, though not fully consistent body of work by Italian
Romanticists between 1920 and 1970, which focus on the findings of extensive
research concerning the Romantics’ sojourn in the various cities of Italy. These

10
As Andrea Henderson claims in her important study Romantic Identities: Varieties
of Subjectivity 1774–1830 (1996), the depth model which traditional criticism has canonized
as the Romantic view of subjectivity, was only one available model among many during
the Romantic period (2). Henderson argues that ‘the character of Romanticism, like the
characters within many Romantic works, has no deep truth. It is the creature of surfaces,
of context, and of varying forms; and when it appears most self-consistent, it may be least
so’ (5). Henderson is right in emphasizing the plurality of identities competing for cultural
validity in Romantic discourse, and thus in multiplying the number of ‘places’ where
subjectivity is discursively elaborated.

See, for instance, Giovanna Foa, Lord Byron, poeta e Carbonaro (Florence, 1935),
Piero Rebora, Civiltà italiana e civiltà inglese: studi e ricerche (Firenze, 1936), Nazzareno
Meneghetti, Lord Byron a Venezia (Venice, 1910), A. McMahan, Con Byron in Italia (1929),
B. Bini, Shelley nel Risorgimento Italiano (1930).
 Introduction 13

studies draw on archival material and other contemporary Italian sources and
have thus provided Anglo-Italian scholarship with valuable historical information
on the various incidents that marked the Italian experience of Byron, Shelley,
Coleridge, Keats and others. The problem with these monographs, however, is
the often indiscriminate mixture of historical facts with idealized, story-bound
accounts of the Romantics’ life in Italy, a result of the authors’ own enthusiasm
and admiration for the British expatriates who had achieved extraordinary fame in
the late nineteenth century.
Recent scholarship has attempted a more in-depth reading of the complex
historical, political and cultural contexts which have informed the British
Romantics’ Italian experience. Within a climate of Romantic studies currently
attuned to themes of travel, imperialism, politics and feminism, the studies
which engage with the Romantics’ relations to Italy consider more carefully the
problematics inherent in the encounter of the two cultures, re-examining key issues
such as national and cultural identity, place, translation, representation. Thus, in
their evaluations of these poets’ works, these critical investigations attempt to
remove Italy from the sphere of unmarked space to a culturally resonant locale,
to a place overwritten with stories and histories, to a place structured by historical
subjectivity.12
Pursuing the path indicated by these works, one of the principal aims of this
study is to attempt a revisionist reading of Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley and
Leigh Hunt’s ‘italianità’, moving it away from the idea of a purely aesthetic or
poetic attachment to Italy to re-place it in its ‘situatedness’, that is, in its complex
ideological prescriptions.13 In my opinion, the varied degrees of identification these
writers display with Italy’s geo-history – that is, with its culture, politics, language
and community – are part of a complex and qualitative attempt to configure a
bicultural identity. My use of the verb ‘configure’ in the context of their identity

12
Without overlooking their diversities and distinct methodological approaches, five
characteristic instances of such scholarship are: Mario Curreli and Anthony L. Johnson’s
edited volume Paradise of Exiles: Shelley and Byron in Pisa (1988), Alan Weinberg’s
Shelley’s Italian Experience (1991), Edoardo Zuccato’s Coleridge in Italy (1996), Lilla
Maria Crisafulli’s edited volume Shelley e l’Italia (1998), and Daryl Ogden’s ‘Byron,
Italy and the Poetics of Liberal Imperialism’ (2000) in the Keats-Shelley Journal. Drawing
mostly on cultural theory, these studies investigate, more or less extensively, the Romantics’
apprehension of the Italian immaginario as ‘alterità e identità’ [alterity and identity] in their
poems and works (Crisafulli, ‘Introduzione’ 2).
13
Although many British Romantic poets and writers travelled to Italy and were
inspired by the country’s landscape, culture, or history, this has not been my major criterion
for including them in this study. As I argue in the following chapters, the pairing of these
particular Romantics – and hence the exclusion of others – is not based on scholarly habit,
nor does it adhere to any form of ‘canon.’ What brings the Shelleys, Byron, and Leigh
Hunt together in this work is their temporal and spatial contiguity/coexistence in Italy, their
designation by Mary Shelley as a ‘race’, and their systematic figuration (re-presentation)
and configuration (plotting, shaping) of a qualitative, ambivalent bicultural identity through
place, in different yet subtly related ways.
14 Romantic ‘Anglo-Italians’

formation is deliberate, and the volatility and interpenetration of the two meanings
of ‘figure’ (a rhetorical expression and the act of shaping) wishes to suggest that
the narrativisation of the self does not undermine its discursive efficacy . In other
terms, even though the identification to Italian systems of meaning is constructed
in the imagination, it is essentially grounded in time- space-bound actions. My
study also seeks to recover the Romantics’ own discourse of acculturation, as well
as to highlight the ways this discourse is mediated by wider historical contexts.
In this respect, Mary Shelley’s role in the conceptualisation of this project has
been instrumental. Despite being the least well-known for her association with the
Italians among this company of expatriates, ‘the author of Frankenstein’ carried
further, in a sense, Percy Shelley’s plans for an ideal community of Italianised
British by designating a subject position for them, by retrospectively constructing
the group of acculturated Romantics, calling them into critical being, and theorizing
their intentions and social conduct. As a result, the ‘Anglo-Italian’ paradigm may
serve as a key to interpreting the various meanings which Percy Shelley, Byron,
and the other expatriates considered here attach to their conflictive identifications
with Italianness. Nonetheless, Mary Shelley’s texts and the premises they profess
are meant to expand, not limit, our understanding of this cultural phenomenon,
as my work recognizes that her perspective is largely conditioned by a number of
cultural, societal, political and economic coordinates, and is therefore contestable
and qualitative.
Complicit with the idea of an intertextual dialogue on configurations of
Italianness, the structure of this book itself seeks to facilitate paths of communication
among the texts and contexts examined. In choosing to consider the Romantic
Anglo-Italians in separate chapters, my primary aim has been to highlight the
diversity and variety of their acculturating strategies, as well as the spatial and
temporal specificity which informs the articulation of their Anglo-Italian identity.
Nonetheless, this study draws significantly on the work of Jeffrey Cox, Nicholas
Roe, Greg Kucich and other Romanticists who have attempted in recent years to
locate Romantic culture in the group, in the lived communities within which these
writers worked. As Cox points out in a recent article in The European Romantic
Review, ‘what a focus on the group as a middle ground of culture offers us is a
way of viewing Romanticism not as the achieved vision of isolated geniuses but
as the continually contested project of opposing groups of writers’ (‘Communal
Romanticism’ 332). In placing second generation Romanticism within the circle
around Leigh Hunt known as the Cockney School, Cox’s study challenges
tenacious myths about Romantic isolation, and purports that second generation
English Romantics should be seen in the context of a rich network of writers,
editors, dilettantes, associations and friends who published, read and reviewed
each other’s work.
Thus, even though this study is organized around four individual writers, it
makes a conscious effort to see them all as part of a group – the Pisan circle
– which embodied the ideals and aspirations of a community of expatriate liberal
writers who shared the cultural and political vision of post-Waterloo liberalism,
 Introduction 15

and inevitably shared in all the contradictions and ambivalences which beset this
vision. Based on Cox’s premise that the Pisan party was ideologically allied to
the Cockney School, my reading of the Pisan circle is eventually Shelley-centred,
omitting a thorough examination of less well-known members of the community of
expatriates, who deserve to be studied in a separate project relating to the specific
issues they raise. Similarly, The Liberal is considered mainly in relation to Leigh
Hunt’s travelogue on Italy, and not in the full dimension of its Anglo-Italianness,
as it is rendered in the works of the other contributors.
Finally, the primary texts under consideration represent a cross-section of
literary genres and arts – poetry, fiction, periodical review, travelogue, visual
culture – and are intended to suggest that Englishness in relation to its ‘others’ was
an issue at stake in all these domains. As I argue, these texts are spaces in whose
interstices the Romantics figure and configure betweenness and make a case for
their Anglo-Italianness, while at the same time they complicate this positioning by
casting the second half – Italianness – into suspicion. I hold that these texts combine
to create a conflictive, shifting atlas of alternative subjectivities and imaginative
geographies which foreground the problematics of identity and representation.
Byron’s ‘all meridian’ heart, Percy Shelley’s ‘Pisan roots’, Mary Shelley’s ‘Anglo-
Italicus’ self and the ‘Italianized Cockney’ vestiture of The Liberal compel us,
ultimately, to re-chart the map of Romantic identity and to re-examine the role of
roots, routes and hyphens in its construction.
Taking its bearings from the problematics involved in the interaction of
cultures, Chapter 1 attempts to trace affinities between pre-nineteenth-century
Anglo-Italian imaginative geographies and the figure of the Romantic Anglo-
Italian. More specifically, I argue that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century, a significant part of the British cultural discourse registers the Anglo-
Italian encounter in the form of hybridised spaces, identities, and narrative
forms. My suggestion is that the British expatriates’ identity politics in the post-
Napoleonic era draw on a pre-existing cultural geography of Anglo-Italianness.
Thus, the hyphenated identity Mary Shelley invents in the 1820s to legitimize
the young Romantics’ ‘elective affinities’ with the adopted country and its people
is, to a degree, anticipated in the atypical inter-spaces and volatile bicultural
landscapes created in the art and literature of the preceding century. Although I
am not arguing for a continuum between the two constructions of Italianness, I
believe that the demarcation of an alternative geography of cultural identity in
late eighteenth-century Capriccio paintings (by English and Italian artists) and in
Madame de Staël’s Corinne underpins the makeup of the Romantic Anglo-Italian.
At the same time, however, this cultural discourse pre-figures the contradictions,
ambivalences, and modalities which are inherent in this Romantic identity.
Chapter 2 traces the textual origins and evolution of the Anglo-Italian in Mary
Shelley’s writings. Since the most complete sketches and references are made in
her reviews and essays, my discussion focuses on ‘The English in Italy’, ‘A Visit
to Brighton’, and ‘Modern Italy’, but it also utilizes her letters and other subject-
related documents, most of which have received little critical attention. The chapter
16 Romantic ‘Anglo-Italians’

concludes with a brief consideration of her travelogue Rambles in Germany and

Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844) in order to show how the figure evolves
through time and how Mary Shelley’s last work, in an instance of self-assessment,
projects a critique of in-betweenness. Although the chapter is centred on her post-
Italian period, there are frequent cross-references to her Italian experience because
the latter helps to elucidate her subsequent remarks on the ‘race’ of Anglo-Italians.
In discussing these texts and contexts, I wish to qualify Mary Shelley’s strategy
as particularly enabling. More specifically, I argue that she prescribes the Anglo-
Italian condition of ‘betweenness’ as a model of acculturation into the Italian
society, and as a distinct standard of taste. By capitalising on her own aesthetic
competence conferred by this exclusive taste, as well as the professed originality
of her views on things Italian, Mary Shelley claims distinction as a mediator of
cultures, and as a female author.
While the second chapter is concerned with the Anglo-Italian as a standard
of taste and as Mary Shelley’s strategy of distinction, Chapter 3 engages with
the discourses of authenticity and acculturation Byron exemplifies. As I argue,
Byron’s assimilation into the Italian scene of his day is conditioned by highly
specific social, political, economic and cultural coordinates. His Anglo-Italian
discourse, significantly informed by his Romantic cosmopolitanism, constructs
and performs identity as a hybrid structure which inhabits a ‘passage between
fixed identifications’ (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 4). More specifically,
by tracing Byron’s varied attempts to chart his meridian self along/despite his
northern one in his poems Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV, ‘To the Po. June 2nd
1819’, Beppo, and The Prophecy of Dante, I wish to show that in the realm of
his geographical poetics, Byron conceives of identity as an active process that
involves inclusion and exclusion, identification and detachment, that is, a process
in which the building of identity is at the same time an evasion of it. Also,
informed by this study’s concern to restore context, the first section of this chapter
situates Byron’s rhetoric of Anglo-Italianness in the climate of the rich topical
discourse of authenticity recorded in post-Napoleonic periodicals and in the travel
writings of such ‘Anglo-Italian’ authors as Lady (Sydney Owenson) Morgan and
Henry Digby Beste. The texts considered prefigure the various plots that stage the
mediation between the two cultures, and raise issues concomitant with Byron’s
own experience of acculturation. Thus, a parallel reading of these writings further
elucidates the cultural assumptions which lie behind their affinities, divergences,
and problematics.
My final chapter continues the task of exploring how the Romantics fashioned
their identity via the meanings of place, only this time place is examined, both in
its material reality, and in its oneiric transfiguration. More explicitly, I argue that
Shelley’s relation to the social, economic, and political space of Pisa evidences
an ‘egocentric structuring’ (Relph 50). His alliance is qualitative, conflicting
and shifting, and defies simple categorisation under the headings of insideness
or outsideness. This is why Shelley’s acculturation practices as an Anglo-Italian
ought to be examined within a specific geographical-political context. To support
 Introduction 17

this argument I introduce primary material which clarifies the poet’s response to
the Pisan milieu, such as the lyric poems ‘The Tower of Famine’, ‘Evening: Ponte
al Mare, Pisa’, as well as Shelley’s Italian review of Sgricci’s improvvisazione. I
contend that Shelley’s politics of alliance with the Pisan community are informed
by his identity politics, which are in turn formed by his association with a group
of liberal intellectuals, the Pisan circle, an affiliate to the Cockney School. Hence
I argue that the implementation of Pisa – as a real place and as a topos – in the
construction of an alternative community by the British liberals is deeply embedded
in the politics of their age.
This is a point I set out to exemplify in connection to Leigh Hunt and the
publication of The Liberal. After investigating the logistics of this ambitious
project and its inception as a reformist publication, I focus on Leigh Hunt’s
epistolary travelogue ‘Letters from Abroad.’ What I wish to suggest is that the
historical importance of the Pisan circle and the related periodical work lies not
only in its symbolic significance as an act of communal sensibility and Romantic
contestation, but also in its attempt to give provisional ground – both figurative
and real – to a bicultural social space, identity, and literacy.
As well as an index to the Romantic expatriates’ identity and politics, the
makeup of the Anglo-Italian can offer, in my opinion, an insightful view on
ideas of culture, class, and society of the early decades of the nineteenth century.
Accordingly, one of the central questions that this book poses is to what extent the
Anglo-Italian reflects and illuminates the contradictions and ideological conflicts
that beset early nineteenth-century British society. Ultimately, it enquires how this
discursive operation combines to produce one of the most complex maps in the
history of European culture, namely, that of British Romantic – and even post-
Romantic – Italy.
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